I think the reason some people buy houses is because they're just
sick to death of moving. I know I'm very soon going to become one
of these people... well, maybe in a year or so.

I've only hired movers for two moves: going from NH to CA and going
from CA to MA. In both cases, the cost of shipping the stuff was
so large that adding in a bunch of big hefty guys packing everything
up and moving it down a million flights of stairs into a truck
parked miles away was barely .001% of the cost.

For every other move (and I've moved a lot over the last 10 or so
years), I've moved myself with the help of friends and family. Every
time, I've used muscles I didn't know I had and gotten bruises the
size of small third world nations in places I didn't think could
bruise. Crazy stuff!

This time I vow not to get any new stuff and to give away half of the
stuff I have! I swear I'm going to do it this time!

After work, I went to my car with the full expectation that I was going to
hop into it and drive home. Alas, such was not the case! There was
this bulge in the sidewall of my front driver-side tire. The bulge was
the size of Kansas, so I thought it prudent not to drive on it. I look
in my trunk and notice my spare is flat (again). It has this really
really slow leak that totally stumps the people I've brought it to twice
to get it fixed. Anyhow, so I bring it all across the street where we
have a most convenient gas station with an air hose. But the air hose
is broken. I toss things around and decide it'll be ok to drive a mile
and a half down the road to the next gas station. They have an air
hose and it works. So I pull out all the gear, jack up the car, pull
all the bolts off, and when I try to pull the wheel off, it doesn't budge.

At this point, I realize that everything is against me. My
scrawny 150-lb ass doesn't have things like weight, leverage, or raw
muscle so there's no way I'm going to get this wheel off the car. I
called AAA and they came down and this beer guzzling mass of man shifts
his mass out of the way and pops my wheel off as if he was popping off
the head of a dandelion. Then we filled my slow-leak spare and he
informed me that a tire that looked like mine did (it had a bulge on
one side the size of Kansas and the other side had more cracks than
a plumber convention) was definitely not fit to drive on. Furthermore,
he added I should get it replaced for free because tires shouldn't
degrade like that with such little usage. Then he muscled his
mass into his truck and drove off.

I know a lot about some stuff, but nothing about tires. I think I
could go to the dealership (I bought the car in CA and I'm in MA now)
nearby and argue with them, but I really hate doing that mostly
because I just hate interacting with the people at the dealership.
I think I'll just have to buy a new tire. Blech.

And that's the end of the story where I found myself in a situation
which I had no hope of solving and I called AAA and they came
to rescue me.

A couple of friends pointed out to me my META tag to refresh from
/~willkg/ to /~willg/blog/ was borked and while it worked fine in
Mozilla and derivatives
(which are the only browsers I use), it didn't work at all in
Internet Explorer. All fixed now though.

First off, it's now "http://www.bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/". I followed
Rael's directions
and implemented the mod_rewrite adjustments. That worked super.
Then it created some mild issues that I'm sorting out now. Namely,
I have all kinds of content in different formats: html, shtml, php, and
now pyblosxom entries. So I'm going to do a massive normalization of
all the content and get rid of the stuff I don't update ever. Getting
there.

Anyhow, so my point is that my entire site is now in a state of flux
as it gets re-absorbed into more of a blog with a slight amount of
static content.

So this woman knocks on my door and tells me she's my neighbor.
Turns out she's lost her cell phone and it's her only phone so
she didn't have another phone to call her cell phone with so that
it could announce its presence with an 8-bit symphonically
annoying ring that makes students of classical music cringe in
ulcer-oriented nausea.

She hands me a pink piece of paper with her number on it and
tells me, very contrary to the typical 3 or 4 day waiting period
between when you get digits and are supposed to dial them, to
call her in 2 minutes. This is definitely the fastest women
I've ever met.

She bounces off of my stoop and runs back to her house eager
for my telephone call. I decided to check my mail. Interesting...
a bill from Verizon. Seems all they send me is bills and
brochures about new plans which would never in a thousand years
match my calling habits or meet my needs. Silly phone company.
If I ever start a phone company, I'm going to send people other
things too. Like maybe a nice little notice, "Hi! We just wanted
to say we were thinking of you! Hope you're having a wonderful
day! From your friends at [insert Will's phone company's name
here]"

After thinking about things for a bit, I called this poor
damsel in distress. Her cell phone must have been pretty
accessible... perhaps it was hidden by a plant of some kind.
Maybe a cactus. Anyhow, it must have been pretty accessible
since she found it on the second ring. She answered, "Thank
you so very much! You helped me out so much!"

And that's the story of the most interesting way I've ever
gotten digits. Actually, it's the only time I've ever gotten
digits from someone I didn't know. Thus it's both the
most and least interesting way I've ever gotten digits.

There's this cat outside my window talking with this other cat
somewhere else. That's all fine. The disconcerting part is that it
sounds like a crying baby. It's such an eerie sound that I'm
wondering if I'm not smack-dab in the middle of a Stephen King
novel. Incidentally, that would explain many things.

Thought
this
was pretty interesting. Pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter
as well except that I'd add that I think most people I know talk about
thinking about doing things far far far more often than actually doing
them. I sometimes wonder if the sheer amount of energy it takes for
people to motivate themselves into just doing things and moving on is
far far less or just far less than just doing things and moving on.

I've always been a believer in doing things when it's right to do them.
I have a bunch of projects that are in various stages of limbo and research
mostly because I'm stuck on one or more points in regards to them.
Sometimes it's a resource issue (like time, money, or space) but usually
it's an issue of components of the project that I haven't figured out
yet. Anyhow, the end result is that I find I talk about the a lot with
other people--but this has helped immensely because other people have
different ideas and it's often that sort of exchange gets me over the
next speedbump.

Regardless, I think talking about things ad infinitum is a bad habit to
get into. Things just are. Talking about them invokes serious
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (princiPAL is your friend) issues.

So I used to be an E2 noder way back and then didn't really have anything
to node anymore so I stopped. One of the things I noded was
Tom Lehrer.
I did that way back in 2000--almost 3 years ago. My friend sends me an im
today with this.
Funnily enough, it's identical to what I wrote--the dude stole the links
and everything!

Totally wild. Someone stole stuff I wrote and then built a web-site out
of it.